Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then Sandor laughed at her, kicking a clod or two into the hole and staring down at their father, quietly reminding everyone, “'Respectable’ is just a word.” His face was tight, his eyes were enormous, and his voice was dry and slow when he added, “And there's more than one route to reach another world."

  * * * *

  8

  Kala's world was settled by a confederation of small and medium-sized churches. Two million parishioners had pooled their resources, acquiring a powerful class-A ripper—a bruising monster capable of stealing away several city blocks. Each congregation selected their best pioneers, and the Last Father was elected to his lofty post, responsible for the well being of more than a thousand brave souls, plus three stowaways and at least fifteen young women kidnapped on the eve of departure. A farm field on the Asian continent was selected, in a region once known as Hunan. Where wheat and leadfruit normally grew, a huge, multi-story dome was erected. Every pioneer plugged his ears with foam and wax. The giant ripper shook the entire structure as it searched across Creation, and, with a final surge, machine and humans were dragged along the hidden dimensions, covering the minuscule distance.

  Rippers had no upper limit to their power, but there were practical considerations. Entering another world meant displacing the native air and land. With its arrival, that class-A ripper shoved aside thousands of tons of dirt and rock, erecting a ring-shaped hill of debris instantly heated by the impact. Wood and peat caught fire, and deep underground, the bedrock was compressed until it was hot enough to melt. The Last Father ordered everyone to remain indoors for the day, breathing bottled air and watching the fires spread and die under an evening thunderstorm. Then the survey teams were dispatched, racing over the blackened ground, finding pastures of black sedge-like grass where they caught the native mice and pseudoinsects as well as a loose-limbed creature with a glancing resemblance to the lost monkeys in the oldest textbooks.

  Experience promised this: If intelligence evolved on a new world, chances are it would live in Asia. Competition was stiffest on large landmasses. That's how it had been on the original earth. Australia was once home to opossums and kangaroos, and dimension-crossing pioneers might have been tempted to linger there, unaware that lying over the horizon were continents full of smart, aggressive placental creatures, including one fierce medium-sized ape with some exceptionally mighty plans.

  But the vermin brought home by the survey teams had simple smooth brains, while the monkey-creature proved to be an intellectual midget next to any respectable cat. The Last Father met with his advisors and then with his loving wife, and following a suitable period of contemplation and prayer, he announced that this was where God wished them to remain for the rest of their days.

  The new colony expanded swiftly, in numbers and reach.

  The Last Father died with honor, six of his nine children carrying his body into a granite cathedral built at the site of their arrival.

  By then villages and little cities were scattered across a thousand miles of wilderness. Within ten generations, coal-fired ships were mapping coastlines on every side of the Mother Ocean, while little parties were moving inland, skirting the edges of the Tibetan Plateau on their way to places once called Persia and Turkey, Lebanon and France.

  The original churches grew and split apart, or they shriveled and died.

  And always, new faiths were emerging, often born from a single believer's ideals and his very public fantasies.

  The original class-A ripper served as an altar inside the Last Father's cathedral. A cadre of engineers maintained its workings, while a thousand elite soldiers stood guard over the holy ground. The symbols were blatant and unflinching: First and always, this world would serve as a launching point to countless new realms. Human duty was to build more rippers—a promise finally fulfilled several centuries ago. By Kala's time, the thousand original pioneers had become five billion citizens. Tax codes and social conventions assured that rippers would always be built. Experts guessed that perhaps fifteen billion bodies could live on these warm lands, and with luck and God's blessing, that would be the day when enough rippers were rolling out of enough factories to allow every excess child to escape, every boy free to find his own empty, golden realm, and every girl serving as a good man's happy Wife.

  * * * *

  9

  Sandor hated that his sister traveled alone. Every trip Kala took was preceded by a difficult conversation, on the phone or in person. It was his duty to remind her that the open highway was an exceptionally dangerous place. Sandor always had some tale to share about some unfortunate young woman who did everything right—drove only by day, spoke to the fewest possible strangers, and slept in secure hotels that catered to their kind. Yet without exception, each of those smart ladies had vanished somewhere on the road, usually without explanation.

  “But look at the actual numbers,” Kala liked to counter. “The chance of me being abducted twice in my life—"

  “Is tiny. I know."

  “Dying in a traffic accident is ten times more likely,” she would add.

  But eventually Sandor analyzed the same statistics, ambushing her with a much bleaker picture. “Dying in a wreck is three times as likely,” he informed Kala. “But that's for all women. Old and young. Those in your subset—women in their twenties, with good looks and driving alone—are five times as likely to disappear as they are to die in a simple, run-of-the-mill accident."

  “But I have to travel,” she countered. Her doctorate involved studying the native communities scattered across a dozen far flung mountaintops. Driving was mandatory, and since there was barely enough funding as it was, she had no extra money to hire reliable security guards. “I know you don't appreciate my work—"

  “I never said that, Kala."

  “Because you're such a painfully polite fellow.” Then laughing at her own joke, she reminded him, “I always carry a registered weapon."

  “Good."

  “And a gun that isn't registered."

  “As you damn well should,” Sandor insisted.

  “Plus there's a thousand little things I do, or two million things I avoid.” She always had one or two new tricks to offer, just to prove that she was outracing her unseen enemies. “And if you have any other suggestions, please ... share them with your helpless little sister...."

  “Don't tease,” he warned. “You don't understand what men want from women. If you did, you'd never leave home."

  Kala had a tidy little apartment on a women's floor, set ten stories above the street—far too high to be stolen away with all but the biggest ripper. On this occasion, Sandor happened to be passing through, supposedly chasing a mechanic's job but not acting in any great hurry to leave. His main mission, as far as she could tell, was to terrify his little sister. As always, he came armed with news clippings and Web sites. He wanted her to appreciate the fact that her mountains were full of horny males, each one more dangerous than the others, and all the bastards fighting for their chance to start some new world. As it happened, last week a large shipment of class-C rippers had just been hijacked from an armed convoy, and now the Children of Forever were proclaiming a time of plenty. And just yesterday, outside New Eternal, some idiot drove a big freight truck through two sets of iron gates before pulling up beside the classroom wing of a ladies’ academy. Moments later, a large class-B ripper fired off, leaving behind a hemispherical hole and a mangled building, as well as a thousand scared teenage girls, saved only because they had been called into the auditorium for a hygiene lecture from the school's doctor.

  Kala shrugged at the bad news. “Crap is a universal constant. Nothing has changed, and I'm going to be fine."

  But really, she never felt good about driving long distances, and the recent news wasn't comforting. Nearly a hundred stolen rippers were somewhere on the continent, which had to shift the odds that trouble would find her. Kala let herself feel the fear, and then with a burst of nervous creativity, she blurted out a possible solut
ion.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  Sandor was momentarily stunned.

  “If you're that especially worried about me, ride along and help me with my work. Unless you really do have some plush mechanic's job waiting."

  “All right then,” he answered. “I'd like that."

  “A long family vacation,” she said with a grin.

  And he completed her thought, adding, “Just like we used to do."

  * * * *

  More than ten years had passed since they last spent time together, and the summer-long journey gave them endless chances to catch up. But for all the days spent on the road, not to mention the weeks hiking and working on alpine trails, they shared remarkably little. Kala heard nothing about life in prison and very little about how Sandor had made his living since his release. And by the same token, she never felt the need to mention past boys and future men—romantic details that she always shared with her closest friends. For a time, the silences bothered her. But then she decided siblings always had difficulty with intimacy. Sharing genetics and a family was such a deep, profound business that no one felt obliged to prove their closeness by ordinary routes. Sandor revealed himself only in glimpses—a few words or a simple gesture—while in her own fashion, Kala must have seemed just as close-mouthed. But of course these secrets of theirs didn't matter. This man would always be her brother, and that was far larger than any other relationship they might cobble together while driving across the spine of a continent.

  Sandor relished his job as protector. At every stop, he was alert and a little aggressive, every stranger's face deserving a quick study, and some of them requiring a hard warning stare. She appreciated the sense of menace that seemed to rise out of him at will. In ways she hadn't anticipated, Kala enjoyed watching Sandor step up to a counter, making innocent clerks flinch. His tattoos flexed and his face grew hard as stone, and she liked the rough snarl in his voice when he said, “Thank you.” Or when he snapped at some unknown fellow, “Out of our way. Please. Sir."

  If anything, empty wilderness was worse than the open road. It made him more suspicious, if not out-and-out paranoid.

  Kala's work involved an obscure genus of pseudoinsects. She was trying to find and catalog unknown species before they vanished, collecting data about their habitat and specimens that she froze and dried and stuck into long test tubes. One July evening, on the flank of a giant southern volcano, she heard a peculiar sound from behind a grove of spruce trees. A rough hooting, it sounded like. “I wonder what that was,” she mentioned. Sandor instantly slipped away from the fire, walking the perimeter at least twice before returning again, one hand holding a long flashlight and the other carrying an even longer pistol equipped with a nightscope. “So what was it?” she asked.

  “Boys,” he reported. “They were thinking of camping near us."

  “They were?"

  “Yeah,” he said, sitting next to the fire again. “But I guess for some reason they decided to pull up their tent and move off. Who knows why?"

  Moments like that truly pleased Kala.

  But following her pleasure was a squeamish distaste. What kind of person was she? She thought of herself as being independent and self-reliant, but on the other hand, she seemed to relish being watched over by a powerful and necessarily dangerous man.

  Two days later, driving north, Sandor mentioned that he had never gotten his chance to visit the Grand Canyon. “Our vacation never made it,” he reminded her. “And I haven't found the time since."

  Kala let them invest one full day of sightseeing.

  The canyon's precise location and appearance varied on each world. But there was always a river draining that portion of the continent, and the land had always risen up in response to the predictable tectonics. Since their earth was wetter than most, the river was big and angry, cutting through a billion years of history on its way to the canyon floor. Kala paid for a cable-car ride to the bottom. They ate hard-boiled blue-hen eggs and mulberries for lunch, and afterwards, walking on the rocky shoreline, she pointed to the rotting carcass of a Helen-trout. The First Father didn't bring living fish with him, but later Fathers realized that fish farming meant cheap protein. The Helen-trout came from the fifth new world—indiscriminate feeders that could thrive in open ocean or fresh water, and that adored every temperature from freezing to bathwater. No major drainage in the world lacked the vermin. “They die when they're pregnant,” she explained. “Their larvae use the mother as food, eating her as she rots, getting a jump on things before they swim away."

  Sandor seemed to be listening. But then again, he always seemed to pay attention to his surroundings. In this case, he gave a little nod, and after a long pause said, “I'm curious, Kala. What do you want to accomplish? With your work, I mean."

  He asked that question every few days, as if for the first time.

  At first Kala thought that he simply wasn't hearing her answers. Later, she wondered if he was trying to break her down, hoping to make her admit that she didn't have any good reason for her life's investment. But after weeks of enduring this verbal dance, she began to appreciate what was happening. To keep from boring herself, she was forced to change her response. Inside the canyon, staring at the dead fish, she didn't bother with old words about the duty and honor that came from saving a few nameless bugs. And she avoided the subject of great medicines that probably would never emerge from her work. Instead, staring down at the rich bulging body, she offered a new response.

  “This world of ours is dying, Sandor."

  The statement earned a hard look and an impossible-to-read grin. “Why's that?” he asked over the roar of the water.

  “A healthy earth has ten or twenty or fifty million species. Depending on how you count them.” She shook her head, reminding him, “The Last Father brought as many species as possible. Nearly a thousand multicellular species have survived here. And that's too few to make an enduring, robust ecosystem."

  Sandor shrugged and gestured at the distant sky. “Things look good enough,” he said. “What do you mean it's dying?"

  “Computer models point to the possibility,” she explained. “Low diversity means fragile ecosystems. And it's more than just having too few species. It's the nature of these species. Wherever we go, we bring weed species. Biological thugs, essentially. And not just from the original earth but from seventeen distinct evolutionary histories. Seventeen lines that are nearly alien to one another. That reduces meaningful interactions. It's another factor why there will eventually come a crunch."

  “Okay. So when?"

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Next year?"

  “Not for thousands of years,” she allowed. “But there is a collapse point, and after that, the basic foundations of this biosphere will decline rapidly. Phytoplankton, for one. The native species are having troubles enduring the new food chains, and if they end up vanishing, then nobody will be making free oxygen."

  “Trees don't make oxygen?"

  “They do,” she admitted. “But their wood burns or rots. And rotting is the same reaction as burning, chemically speaking."

  Sandor stared at the gray mother fish.

  “You know how it is when you turn on a ripper?” Kala asked. “You know how the machine has to search hard for a world with a livable atmosphere?"

  Her brother nodded, a look of anticipation building in the pale brown eyes.

  “Do you ever wonder why so many earths don't have decent air for us? Do you?” Kala gave him a rough pat on the shoulder, asking, “What if a lot of pioneers have been moving across the multiverse? Humans and things that aren't human, too. And what if most of these intrepid pioneers eventually kick their worlds out of equilibrium, killing them as a consequence?"

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Then after a long thoughtful moment: “Huh."

  And that was the last time Sandor ever bothered to doubt the importance of Kala's work.

  * * * *

  10 />
  The heart of every ripper was a cap-shaped receptacle woven from diamond whiskers, each whisker doctored with certain rare-earth elements and infused with enough power to pierce the local brane. But as difficult as the receptacle was to build, it was a simple chore next to engineering the machines to support and control its work. Hard drives and the capacitors had to function on the brink of theoretical limits. Heat and quantum fluctuations needed to be kept at a minimum. The best rippers utilized a cocktail of unusual isotopes, doubling their reliability as well as tripling the costs, while security costs added another 40 percent to the final price.

  Twice that summer, Kala and her brother saw convoys of finished rippers being shipped across country. Armored trucks were painted a lush emerald green, each one accompanied by two or three faster vehicles bristling with weapons held by tough young men. Routes and schedules were supposed to be kept secret. Since even a small ripper was worth a fortune, the corporations did whatever they could to protect their investments. Which made Kala wonder: How do the Children of Forever learn where one convoy would be passing, and what kind of firepower would it take to make the rippers their own?

  Sandor was driving when they ran into one of the convoys. A swift little blister of armor and angry faces suddenly passed them on the wrong side. “Over,” screamed every face. “Pull over."

  They were beside the Mormon Sea, on a highway famous for scenery and its narrow, almost nonexistent, shoulders. But Sandor complied, fitting them onto a slip of asphalt and turning off the engine, then setting the parking brake and turning to look back around the bend, eyes huge and his lower lip tucked into his mouth.

  For a moment or two, Kala watched the bright water of the inland sea, enjoying the glitter stretching to the horizon. Then came the rumble of big engines, and a pair of heavy freight trucks rolled past, followed by more deadly cars, and then another pair of trucks.

  “Class-Cs,” Sandor decided. “About a hundred of them, built down in Highborn."

  The trucks had no obvious markings. “How can you tell?"